A nation that is ill-defined cannot pursue a national interest properly so-called. Without an articulated national interest, a nation will remain at the mercy of special interests and in worst cases personal interests, just as Nigeria has been since 1966 Jan 15. A conflict of special interests and extreme personal interests have led Nigeria into corruption, military coups and civil war. It has led to pervasive poverty and insecurity in the abundance of resources and good sense.
For this general reason, Nigeria must be defined or redefined in such a way as to articulate a National Interest and more particularly in consideration of the following:
- There are over 360 Indigenous nations and communities that form Nigeria and these include over 100 million human beings who have a fundamental right to the ownership and protection of their individual and collective Lands, their Lives and their Livelihoods.
- For Nigeria to be acceptable, the right to enjoyment of the rights of any one of the 360 indigenous people cannot be vitiated because of the Liberties of any other of the 360 Indigenous people, neither can the freedom of any individual be allowed to impede on the rights of another.
- Many believe population control as a responsible way of managing society, especially ensuring that social, communal and collective choices should be made in an inclusive and transparent way to ensure optimum population for Nation and the management thereof in terms of education, health, employment, the environment and per capita welfare.
- Unfortunately some do not believe in population control nor population management and take deliberate steps to expand population without recourse to economic, social , security and infrastructure implications. To reinforce this, they ensure that the vessel for child birth ( the Woman) is stripped off choice, voice and entitlement and restricted to the physically and emotionally demanding, function of child production and excluding them from the decision making process of human resource management.
- When the two sets of thought are in one Nigeria, the latter who have no population responsibility or gender sensitivity will s out populate a more circumspect section of the nation until the entire space is drowned by their values , tendencies and lack of sustainable development.
- Today in Nigeria Democracy has come to be mis-defined by our politics and politicians to mean the …Government of the majority, by the majority, for the majority… thereby pushing the nation into an irresponsible drive for numerical growth without qualitative value.
- The actual definition of Democracy being ..’Government of the people, by the people, for the people… presupposes full representation and does not exclude minority populations, whose rights to Lands, and Livelihoods must be protected by any country that they are expected to subscribe to, such as the Federal Republic of Nigeria, or any other nation they consider their own.
- This quest for majority, rather than representative definition of Nigeria and her interests could not have been better demonstrated than by the public statements made by the Governor of Bauchi , Bala Mohammed, who said that Fulani herdsmen from Chad, Niger and other neighboring countries would benefit from the National Livestock Transformation because they are ‘stateless’. He wishes to populate Nigeria with their own kind and at the deliberate expense of indigenous people. To what purpose? To render Nigeria a Stateless nation and a NO MAN’S LAND, ill-defined and where indigenous people are slaves to a ‘majority’
- People make the same mistakes when they omit to study and learn from history. Some Nigerian leaders took history out of schools in 1984/85 and it is clear that it was with a view to set up the future for the repeat of a previous experience.
- The central previous experience common to all indigenous people of Nigeria was the slave trade of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century of both the Trans Atlantic and Sahara kind. Slavery is when your ownership of land, life and livelihood is not yours. Whether 15th century or 21st century a slave is one who works to satisfy the extraction-ist tendency of another person, society or government. Social Contract no longer defines relationship between Government and People, it is now determined by Enforcement without Rights Protection.
- As you are being taxed, your lands and waterways seized without your lived being secured, ask yourselves why? in whose interest? to what end ? Are we being taxed into poverty and enforced into servitude ? NIGERIA has been defined in our absence through the 1999 Constitution.
ARE WE GOING TO SAY NO TO SECOND SLAVERY AND DEMAND FOR A REDEFINITION OF WHO WE ARE AND WHO ARE WE?
Or are we going to Redefine Nigeria as a nation of free and independent indigenous African people?
Better to start acting before it is too late
©SFB
7/10/2019
—
Dr. Sina Fagbenro-Byron,FIIM
‘Invest in People, Believe in God’
www.mothergold.org
